149198-wildstar-rating-systemyay-or-nay
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- I know why Wildstar doesn't do it. It's because all those 200 character paragraphs would take SO MUCH DATASPACE! They'd have to charge us money for the space needed to hold our comments! They are actually doing us a favor, you see. They can't hold our holo-wardrobe AND hold our direct feedback. That would be madness. Edited January 24, 2016 by Ildur | |} ---- ---- ---- They can't even keep us logged in their forums itself :( | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- I agree with you to some degree, but fundamentally what a ratings system gives you that internal metrics don't is a chance to ask players why they think something is worth doing again or not--this is particularly true if the ratings system gives multiple choice options that are written to let people address things being too far off in one direction or the other. Consider a survey for any particular instance here where every question had a graded scale from 1 to 5, with 3 being "about right", 1 being "too easy/quick/rewarding" and 5 being "too hard/slow/unrewarding". You can ask about content pacing, challenge, comprehensibility, fun, rewards. You can ask whether people did the content as a PUG, as a guild group, by themselves, with a few friends. You can ask what role they played, how long they waited, how much experience they have. You can give them a different survey each time they run an instance to keep the number of questions per survey small and the time to do it less than a minute. Give the option for a small reward by taking the survey while allowing those so inclined to simply skip it and move on. Feed the results straight into a database that compiles a running average of scores. You get feedback from people as they do the content, which means you're hearing from people who are actually doing your content as it is currently tuned, not based on their experiences of a few months previous. You know exactly where people think things are overtuned or undertuned and what they think would make the experience better. If there's a progression, you know exactly where people are falling off the progression and why. Metrics don't give you any of that. And it becomes a lot harder for game management to bungle their interpretation of the metrics when they're actually getting information about preferences from the playerbase. That's why it's not redundant. Care to explain your reasoning as to why feedback isn't good? | |} ---- ---- BnS makes it very easy to simply ignore the surveys--you don't even have to click "decline" to pass them up. I'm sure any game could do the same for people who simply couldn't handle taking a moment to give some feedback. And none of us play games to become QA for the devs. But all of us want to have enjoyable content. When that's not happening, which is better: having developers who have a lot of information about what content players do and don't like, or developers who know that lots of people are leaving but don't have much feedback as to why they're leaving? | |} ---- ---- it was annoying as hell to be asked every 10min how i enjoy content which made me enjoy it less. obv its fine in the beta to get feedback but not in the live game. i would not care if they added the feature on the ptr, in fact that should add it there every time. | |} ---- ---- And in fairness, I can see that being a problem if the survey pops automatically and forces you to stop what you're doing. But BnS doesn't do that. You get a little icon off in the game's task bar, out of the way of the main field of view, and it gives a tooltip if you hover over it that tells you a survey has arrived. It's no more intrusive than getting an in-game email. If you want to do it, you click the icon. If you don't, you simply ignore it. It doesn't ever make you stop and fill something out unless you decide you actually want to provide some feedback. If you don't come to the forums, odds are that you don't even know the PTR exists--and even if you do know about it, you're not going to actually go into it unless you're so heavily invested in the game that you can afford to divert a fair chunk of your free time to playtesting content that is still being checked for bugs. That's a completely unrepresentative sampling of the playerbase, which makes it pretty much useless as a gauge of how the general playerbase is going to respond to content. | |} ---- ---- ---- And yet there's a reason virtually every MMO has a test server. Whether the participants in the PTR are representative or not depends on factors we don't have information on. With enough participants the sample size becomes sufficiently random to be useful, if not precisely representative. | |} ---- I have to be honest here, while I support helping devs, I'm pretty confident in stating that a dev who really ~needs~ player feedback is not qualified to have their position. Feedback is totally useful and quality feedback versus crap feedback might make a game, but game devs have to stand on their own merit. I want enjoyable content because I bought/am playing a good game, not because I helped to get it there— that's what jobs are for. :P So I will voluntarily voice opinions and maybe complete surveys outside of the game, of my own free will, 'cause I do like to help a game I'm passionate about. But once you're even slightly impacting the gameplay experience by 1. Drawing us out of it and 2. Asking us to ~analyze~ it, I believe you've made a serious mistake. However... there's usually a compromise in life. If I had the option to click ~one time~ and never see a survey or its like in-game, then I'd say OK, add the thing and I hope it helps. But if I have to click 'no' every time I complete a dungeon, zone, or anything else, or if I have to see little icons or flashy things somewhere on my screen that indicate "help us please", then no, totally unacceptable in a gameplay environment. :( One other complication I'll point out with your reasoning, Yasfan: You mention doing this to get away from small samples/poor representation of the player base, right? So if the devs were to add a survey or whatever but make it so it's very easy to ignore, are they actually going to ~get~ a better sample than they would on a PTR? Is that even worthwhile? | |} ---- ---- Actually, we do know a few things about participants in the PTR. They are aware that the PTR exists and sufficiently invested in the game to download a second version of it and spend their time there when they could instead be spending their time playing characters that are persistent and don't frequently get wiped and reset. Whether having feedback selectively from that population of players is useful or not depends a great deal on whether that population of players can be counted on to look beyond their own interests to the game's viability. And if there's any take-home message to be drawn from this game, there's really no guarantee that will be the case. There will always be some players who simply couldn't care less about ever providing any feedback to the devs. But people who want to give feedback will become more likely to do so as the effort required to provide feedback goes down. That's why companies who want feedback make it as easy as possible to provide it, and usually even sweeten the deal a little with a modest incentive to those who do so. So to answer your question, all we need to do is ask the following question. Which of the following options is less effort? 1. clicking an in-game icon that pops up a survey that asks you a few multiple choice questions. 2. downloading a second version of the game and playing it after transferring your character over, then providing your feedback through bug reports, forum responses, or direct communication with developers. The answer is pretty obviously "1", so that approach will get feedback from not only those players who want to provide it and are willing to go to the PTR to do so, but also those players who want to provide it but aren't willing to go to the PTR to do so. So yeah, it's a better representation of the playerbase than just the PTR. Given how much difference there is in effort between the PTR and an in-game icon, probably a much better representation of the playerbase. Is it worthwhile? In a game that's doing really well, probably not. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In a game that's doing really poorly but has a chance of recovering, almost certainly. The game needs to figure out where the problem is and fix it rather than screw around fixing things that aren't really driving people out. In a game that's doing so poorly it's a lost cause, nah. It's already FUBAR, there's no point in throwing good money after bad. I'll leave it up to you to decide which of those three categories fits this game. | |} ---- You make a good argument and I have no doubt that it's less effort on the player's part to have the survey in-game— but I still question whether doing this would generate useful results if the survey wasn't intrusive (meaning I think it would ~have~ to be intrusive to get a useful amount of feedback, and then I'd hate it :P ). "Better than" just doesn't convince me. To the direct question of worth, IMO Wildstar is the mid option, but I don't see this being a situation where we need to figure out "where the problem is". I mean, they ~know~ where many problems are, but fixing those problems is just as troublesome as anything else. Often enough the fixes come with bugs or are themselves denounced by the vocal community. This is why I stand by my earlier idea that feedback can't save Wildstar. The devs have to stand on their own strengths and everyone at Carbine has to pull weight to ensure forthcoming improvements are clean and effective. Unsurprisingly, I don't think catering to a bunch of armchair developers would help much with that. :p BUT... again, as long as I can get rid of it easily and not have to face it again, I wouldn't complain about a survey added in-game. ;) | |} ----